


Strictly Business

by vayleen



Category: Sailor Moon - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-18
Updated: 2006-02-18
Packaged: 2017-12-08 19:36:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/765217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vayleen/pseuds/vayleen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The music moved through her blood and came through her fingers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strictly Business

The gazebo was Michiru’s favorite place to play her violin, if ‘play’ was the right verb in that circumstance. Perhaps perform would be better. Yes, she was performing late in the evening to empty benches in an empty park.

The music moved through her blood and came through her fingers, almost liquefying the air with the melodies plaguing her. They felt painful to push out of her body but Michiru knew that if she kept them bottled up they would devour her from the inside, threaten her life in a way that no amount of genetically altered monsters could. So she stood in that gazebo perfectly poised, yet feeling sick, tears pouring down her usually pale skin.

_How could she... how could she... how could she..._

Mamoru was running almost blindly down the Tokyo streets, all the usual cool-headed mannerisms gone, just barely missing several collisions with oncoming traffic as he went. He shouldn’t have left her like that. She was vulnerable, exposed. Every time he blinked he saw her huddled on his carpet, arms wrapped around her tiny body, sweet soprano voice pleading with him. But all he could feel was shock, anger, betrayal. He needed out.

He could hear music. Mamoru stopped short and laid his hand on his knees to catch his breath, listening. It soothed him. He closed his eyes and felt the music vibrations hum inside his head. Mamoru was suddenly aware of everything; he felt the fabric of his slacks with his hands. He could feel the shirt and sweater on his back, clinging to his overheated skin. The cool autumn wind rustling his hair.

Newly atoned, Mamoru followed the music like it was river until he found Michiru in the gazebo. Noticing the tears streaming down her cheeks, he felt a strange mixture of sympathy and selfishness. He understood now why the music spoke to him the way it did. Here was the only person that felt the exact same betrayal and pain that he did. A part of him loathed that fact and wanted to wallow in solitude with the knowledge of fidelity. The other longed for the comradeship he was sharing with the pretty young woman surrounded by the lights of the setting sun.

The music reached a sharp crescendo and ended. Michiru opened her eyes and saw Mamoru standing a little ways off openly staring at her. The red light of the setting sun did little to hide the way his eyes were bloodshot, or the faint trails left over from tears. His hair and clothes were completely disheveled and he was ragged and wide-eyed like a stray cat.

Any other day, it would have been comical for them. Every other day when they saw each other, they were perfectly poised and cool, aloof. Each one embodying the masculine or feminine ideal easily like they were born to it. Each one too perfect. And now that all of those barriers were gone and they silently stared at each other like it was perfectly normal. Because every sense of normality was shattered in just a few hours and it rattled at the foundations of their lives until the differences between normal and abnormal were entirely blurred.

Michiru’s hands flexed around the neck of her violin. “Do you... do you want some tea? Maybe...”

Mamoru jolted at the sound of her voice. “Yes. Sure, I mean...”

The walked towards a tea shop, Mamoru following Michiru from a half step behind. Mostly he looked at the ground, at the cracks passing under his feet. Michiru walked with stiff posture, subconsciously attempting a desperate attempt at her usual grace. But the rhythms of her steps were as erratic as her heartbeat and she only stiffened more.

The table was nestled in a dim corner, next to a window overlooking the street. Michiru was cupping her teacup, longing for warmth in the cold pit in her stomach that drinking tea barely touched. Mamoru was intently focused between the street or her hands around her cup, depending.

Michiru looked strange with strands of aqua hair falling haphazardly around her face from her ribbon, with her lips dry and stained with lipstick and what remained of the mascara that had made trails on her cheeks on her lower eyelids. Mamoru found himself taking in these details hungrily and storing them away, like he was painting her in his memory.

Michiru looked up to see his intent stare but she didn’t blush like Usagi would have if she saw Mamoru studying her that way. Instead, she matched his gaze with hers. His eyes, sharp and jaded, hers drifting and fluctuating. Blue diamonds over a green field.

“You look how I feel,” Michiru told him.

Mamoru smiled faintly. “Yes, I imagine so.”

Pause.

“I can’t talk about it.”

He sighed. “Then we won’t. I don’t want to.”

“I mean,” she said suddenly, as though she didn't hear him, “What is there to talk about? Nothing is as it seems or is what it’s supposed to be. I live for what was supposed to be my destiny. With the sorrow that comes with sacrifice haunting my waking movements.” Michiru’s eyes glazed, and though she was staring right at Mamoru, she looked through him to the set of gray eyes in her memory. “I lived for the only other soul who knew the same sorrow I did,” she whispered. Mamoru had to lean across the table to hear her.

“Fate brings us love and ties it to us with a red thread like a chokehold,” Mamoru said softly. Michiru leaned forward to hear him better. “It ties me up it knots, consumes me with obsession. I can’t spend a moment without thinking about it on some level.”

“Do you love her?” Michiru asked in a whisper.

 _I died for her._ “Yes,” Mamoru said.

They were leaning in, very close. And then their foreheads were touching. Mamoru’s breath was coming in rasps. Michiru’s pulse was quickening, making her dizzy. He could sense the sultry smell of her perfume mixed with grass. She felt his hair against the bare skin of her face.

“I love her irrevocably,” he said in a barely audible voice, the normally smooth baritone voice roughened with obvious pain. “Do you love her?”

Michiru knew he was referring to Haruka. “I would die for her.”

Mamoru felt her breath on his lips and it drove him crazy. He bit his lower lip tentatively as she angled her head just the right way so that he was pulled towards her like a magnet. Her lips were dry against his swollen ones.

It started out slow. Michiru kissed the corner of his mouth as he breathed in. Mamoru kissed her as she tilted her head up to reach him better. Then they switched angles and the kisses started to last longer. He moved his hand to brush away stray hairs and rest on her neck. She reached to run her fingers through his dark hair. Somewhere they became more desperate and frantic, partly because of that comradeship they felt from mutual betrayal but mostly because they were superimposing other people over the face across from them.


End file.
